Our oldest kid consistently brings the funny

One of the funniest people I know was born on this day in 1994. She also happens to be my daughter Elissa.

Elissa's humor is perhaps best described as "dry," "biting," and I'll go so far as to say "dark."

Whatever you want to call it, she makes me laugh all the time.

She is, for example, a master of using capital letters to humorous effect in texts. A funny word is somehow 10 times funnier when Elissa types it in all caps for emphasis.

Each of our kids has the funny gene, but Elissa started at a particularly early age. I remember one time when she was very young – maybe 18 months old – riding in her car seat while Terry and I sat in the front. A song I liked came on the radio, so I started singing along.

Suddenly from the backseat came a little voice urging me, "Sing it, Scotto."

Terry and I died. Elissa knew she was funny, and she has never wavered in her comedic confidence since.

Elissa's hobbies include crocheting clothes for her plastic goose Fernando, who sits in her front window and entertains the whole neighborhood with his fashionable 'fits. Only someone with a deep sense of the absurd would spend so much time making a plastic goose look good.

I am inordinately proud of her.

Happy birthday to our first child and the headliner of our family comedy festival. And thanks for the laughs, kid.